Having no prescribed dogma in today’s climate seems like a fantasy. People can’t seem to wrap their head around not having an ideology you subscribe to.
I pride myself on being radically open-minded to new ideas and always finding the counterargument to any given position.
Despite my approach, there’s a question I’ve been juggling with that I can’t seem to shake.
Do we all have an ideology we subscribe to, even if we don’t realize it? Are there underlying assumptions guiding our thoughts that we’re not aware of?
Charlie Munger once famously said, “Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology, because it cabbages up one’s mind.”
Is the avoidance of intense ideology still an ideology?
What Charlie is getting at here is that it’s important to decouple our identity from our subscribed ideologies. When our identity gets wrapped up in ideology, we blind ourselves to uncover truth and pursue ideas outside our way of thinking.
However, even the most rational thinkers throughout history had strong beliefs in something. Charlie, whom I greatly admire, certainly had his way of doing things and living.
The Founding Fathers of the United States were revolutionary thinkers by definition. Many of them were inspired by Enlightenment-era thinking, which emphasized reason over religion and other non-dogmatic points of view. Even they stood for an ideal future that they wanted to see through the creation of the Declaration of Independence and a new nation. It was a contrarian position, but a position that presents itself as an ideology.
Being “contrarian” does not necessarily mean you are not ideological. You are subscribing to the ideology of being outside the norm.
Counterculture is another great example of this. Counterculture rejects societal norms and lives outside of what society deems acceptable. Counterculture groups find comfort in knowing others share their same beliefs and ideals.
What’s important here, and often overlooked, is how we arrive at the ideology. Are we arriving at the ideology through the lens of logic and reason? Or are we blindly shouting the opinions of other people? This is how we can (and must) distinguish the signal from the noise.
If all of us saw through the lens of reason and rationality over blind loyalty, humanity would be better for it.